architect, can lay his bare arms across the bar and sell them to thehighest bidder, for the houses are coming up like toadstools after rain.The men who do not build cheer those who do, in that building meansbacking your belief in your town--yours to you and peculiarly. Confoundall other towns whatsoever. Behind the crowd of business men the weeklytown paper plays as a stockwhip plays on a mob of cattle. There ishonour, heaped, extravagant, imperial for the good--the employer oflabour, the builder of stores, the spender of money; there is abuse,savage and outrageous, for the bad, the man who 'buys out of the town,'the man who intends to go, the sitter on the fence; with persuasion andinvitation in prose, verse, and zincograph for all that outside worldwhich prefers to live in cities other than Ours.

Now the editor, as often as not, begins as a mercenary and ends as apatriot. This, too, is all of a piece with human nature. A few yearslater, if Providence is good, comes the return for judicious investment.Perhaps the town has stood the test of boom, and that which wasclapboard is now Milwaukee brick or dressed stone, vile in design butpermanent. The shanty hotel is the Something House, with accommodationfor two hundred guests. The manager who served you in his shirt-sleevesas his own hotel clerk, is gorgeous in broadcloth, and needs to bereminded of the first meeting. Suburban villas more or less adorn theflats, from which the liveliest fancy (and fancy was free in the earlydays) hung back. Horse-cars jingle where the prairie schooner used tostick fast in the mud-hole, scooped to that end, opposite the saloon;and there is a Belt Electric Service paying fabulous dividends. Then, doyou, feeling older than Methuselah and twice as important, go forth andpatronise things in general, while the manager tells you exactly whatsort of millionaire you would have been if you had 'stayed by the town.'

Or else--the bottom has tumbled out of the boom, and the town new madeis dead--dead as a young man's corpse laid out in the morning. Successwas not justified by success. Of ten thousand not three hundred remain,and these live in huts on the outskirts of the brick streets. The hotel,with its suites of musty rooms, is a big tomb; the factory chimneys arecold; the villas have no glass in them, and the fire-weed glows in thecentre of the driveways, mocking the arrogant advertisements in theempty shops. There is nothing to do except to catch trout in the streamthat was to have been defiled by the city sewage. A two-pounder liesfanning himself just in the cool of the main culvert, where the aldershave crept up to the city wall. You pay your money and, more or less,you take your choice.

By the time that man has seen these things and a few others that gowith a boom he may say that he has lived, and talk with his enemies inthe gate. He has heard the Arabian Nights retold and knows the inwardkernel of that romance, which some? little folk say is vanished. Herethey lie in their false teeth, for Cortes is not dead, nor Drake, andSir Philip Sidney dies every few months if you know where to look. Theadventurers and captains courageous of old have only changed their dressa little and altered their employment to suit the world in which theymove. Clive came down from Lobengula's country a few months agoprotesting that there was an empire there, and finding very few thatbelieved. Hastings studied a map of South Africa in a corrugated ironhut at Johannesburg ten years ago. Since then he has altered the mapconsiderably to the advantage of the Empire, but the heart of the Empireis set on ballot-boxes and small lies. The illustrious Don Quixoteto-day lives on the north coast of Australia where he has found thetreasure of a sunken Spanish galleon. Now and again he destroys blackfellows who hide under his bed to spear him. Young Hawkins, with a stillyounger Boscawen for his second, was till last year chasing slave-dhowsround Tajurrah; they have sent him now to the Zanzibar coast to begrilled into an admiral; and the valorous Sandoval has been holding the'Republic' of Mexico by the throat any time these fourteen years gone.The others, big men all and not very much afraid of responsibility, areselling horses, breaking trails, drinking sangaree, running railwaysbeyond the timberline, swimming rivers, blowing up tree-stumps, andmaking cities where no cities were, in all the five quarters of theworld. Only people will not believe this when you tell them. They aretoo near things and a great deal too well fed. So they say of the mostcold-blooded realism: 'This is romance. How interesting!' And ofover-handled, thumb-marked realism: 'This is indeed romance!' It is thenext century that, looking over its own, will see the heroes of our timeclearly.

Meantime this earth of ours--we hold a fair slice of it so far--is fullof wonders and miracles and mysteries and marvels, and, in default, itis good to go up and down seeing and hearing tell of them all.

ON ONE SIDE ONLY

NEW OXFORD, U.S.A., _June-July_ 1892.

'The truth is,' said the man in the train, 'that we live in a tropicalcountry for three months of the year, only we won't recognise. Look atthis.' He handed over a long list of deaths from heat that enlivened thenewspapers. All the cities where men live at breaking-strain weresending in their butcher-bills, and the papers of the cities, themselvesapostles of the Gospel of Rush, were beseeching their readers to keepcool and not to overwork themselves while the hot wave was upon them.The rivers were patched and barred with sun-dried pebbles; the logs andloggers were drought-bound somewhere up the Connecticut; and the grassat the side of the track was burned in a hundred places by the sparksfrom locomotives. Men--hatless, coatless, and gasping--lay in the shadeof that station where only a few months ago the glass stood at 30 belowzero. Now the readings were 98 degrees in the shade. Main Street--do youremember Main Street of a little village locked up in the snow thisspring?[2]--had given up the business of life, and an American flagwith some politician's name printed across the bottom hung down acrossthe street as stiff as a board. There were men with fans and alpacacoats curled up in splint chairs in the verandah of the one hotel--amongthem an ex-President of the United States. He completed the impressionthat the furniture of the entire country had been turned out of doorsfor summer cleaning in the absence of all the inhabitants. Nothing looksso hopelessly 'ex' as a President 'returned to stores,' The stars andstripes signified that the Presidential Campaign had opened in MainStreet--opened and shut up again. Politics evaporate at summer heat whenall hands are busy with the last of the hay, and, as the formers put it,'Vermont's bound to go Republican.' The custom of the land is to dragthe scuffle and dust of an election over several months--to theimprovement of business and manners; but the noise of that war comesfaintly up the valley of the Connecticut and is lost among the fiddlingof the locusts. Their music puts, as it were, a knife edge upon the heatof the day. In truth, it is a tropical country for the time being.Thunder-storms prowl and growl round the belted hills, spit themselvesaway in a few drops of rain, and leave the air more dead than before. Inthe woods, where even the faithful springs are beginning to run low, thepines and balsams have thrown out all their fragrance upon the heat andwait for the wind to bring news of the rain. The clematis, wild carrot,and all the gipsy-flowers camped by sufferance between fence line androad net are masked in white dust, and the golden-rod of the pasturesthat are burned to flax-colour burns too like burnished brass. A pillarof dust on the long hog-back of the road across the hills shows where ateam is lathering between farms, and the roofs of the wooden housesflicker in the haze of their own heat. Overhead the chicken-hawk is theonly creature at work, and his shrill kite-like call sends the gapingchickens from the dust-bath in haste to their mothers. The red squirrelas usual feigns business of importance among the butternuts, but this ispure priggishness. When the passer-by is gone he ceases chattering andclimbs back to where the little breezes can stir his tail-plumes. Fromsomewhere under the lazy fold of a meadow comes the drone of amowing-machine among the hay--its _whurr-oo_ and the grunt of the tiredhorses.

[Footnote 2: See 'In Sight of Monadnock.']

Houses are only meant to eat and sleep in. The rest of life is lived atfull length in the verandah. When traffic is brisk three whole teamswill pass that verandah in one day, and it is necessary to exchange newsabout the weather and the prospects for oats. When oats are in therewill be slack time on the farm, and the farmers will seriously think ofdoing the hundred things that they have let slide during the summer.They will undertake this and that, 'when they get around to it.' Thephrase translated is the exact equivalent to the _manana_ of theSpaniard, the _kul hojaiga_ of Upper India, the _yuroshii_ of theJapanese, and the long drawled _taihod_ of the Maori. The only personwho 'gets around' in this weather is the summer boarder--the refugeefrom the burning cities of the Plain, and she is generally a woman. Shewalks, and botanizes, and kodaks, and strips the bark off the whitebirch to make blue-ribboned waste-paper baskets, and the farmer regardsher with wonder. More does he wonder still at the city clerk in ablazer, who has two weeks' holiday in the year and, apparently,unlimited money, which he earns in the easiest possible way by 'sittingat a desk and writing,' The farmer's wife sees the fashions of thesummer boarder, and between them man and woman get a notion of thebeauties of city life for which their children may live to blame them.The blazer and the town-made gown are innocent recruiting sergeants forthe city brigades; and since one man's profession is ever a mystery tohis fellow, blazer and gown believe that the farmer must be happy andcontent. A summer resort is one of the thousand windows whence to watchthe thousand aspects of life in the Atlantic States. Remember thatbetween June and September it is the desire of all who can to get awayfrom the big cities--not on account of wantonness, as people leaveLondon--but because of actual heat. So they get away in their millionswith their millions--the wives of the rich men for five clear months,the others for as long as they can; and, like drawing like, they makecommunities set by set, breed by breed, division by division, over thelength and breadth of the land--from Maine and the upper reaches of theSaguenay, through the mountains and hot springs of half-a-dozeninterior States, out and away to Sitka in steamers. Then they spendmoney on hotel bills, among ten thousand farms, on private companies wholease and stock land for sporting purposes, on yachts and canoes,bicycles, rods, chalets, cottages, reading circles, camps, tents, andall the luxuries they know. But the luxury of rest most of them do notknow; and the telephone and telegraph are faithfully dragged after them,lest their men-folk should for a moment forget the ball and chain atfoot.

For sadness with laughter at bottom there are few things to compare withthe sight of a coat-less, muddy-booted, millionaire, his hat adornedwith trout-flies, and a string of small fish in his hand, clawing wildlyat the telephone of some back-of-beyond 'health resort.' Thus:

And he goes down to eat in a hotel and sleep in his shut-up house. Menare as scarce at most of the summer places as they are in Indianhill-stations in late April. The women tell you that they can't getaway, and if they did they would only be miserable to get back. Nowwhether this wholesale abandonment of husbands by wives is wholesome letthose who know the beauties of the Anglo-Indian system settle forthemselves.

That both men and women need rest very badly a glance at the crowdedhotel tables makes plain--so plain, indeed, that the foreigner who hasnot been taught that fuss and worry are in themselves honourable wishessometimes he could put the whole unrestful crowd to sleep for seventeenhours a day. I have inquired of not less than five hundred men and womenin various parts of the States why they broke down and looked so gash.And the men said: 'If you don't keep up with the procession in Americayou are left'; and the women smiled an evil smile and answered that nooutsider yet had discovered the real cause of their worry and strain, orwhy their lives were arranged to work with the largest amount offriction in the shortest given time. Now, the men can be left to theirown folly, but the cause of the women's trouble has been revealed to me.It is the thing called 'Help' which is no help. In the multitude ofpresents that the American man has given to the American woman (fordetails see daily papers) he has forgotten or is unable to give her goodservants, and that sordid trouble runs equally through the household ofthe millionaire or the flat of the small city man. 'Yes, it's easyenough to laugh,' said one woman passionately, 'we are worn out, and ourchildren are worn out too, and we're always worrying, I know it. Whatcan we do? If you stay here you'll know that this is the land of allthe luxuries and none of the necessities. You'll know and then you won'tlaugh. You'll know why women are said to take their husbands toboarding-houses and never have homes. You'll know what an Irish Catholicmeans. The men won't get up and attend to these things, but _we_ would.If _we_ had female suffrage, we'd shut the door to _all_ the Irish andthrow it open to _all_ the Chinese, and let the women have a littleprotection.' It was the cry of a soul worn thin with exasperation, butit was truth. To-day I do not laugh any more at the race that depends oninefficient helot races for its inefficient service. When next you,housekeeping in England, differ with the respectable, amiable,industrious sixteen-pound maid, who wears a cap and says 'Ma'am,'remember the pauper labour of America--the wives of the sixty millionkings who have no subjects. No man could get a thorough knowledge of theproblem in one lifetime, but he could guess at the size and the importof it after he has descended into the arena and wrestled with the Swedeand the Dane and the German and the unspeakable Celt. Then he perceiveshow good for the breed it must be that a man should thresh himself topieces in naked competition with his neighbour while his wife strugglesunceasingly over primitive savagery in the kitchen. In India sometimeswhen a famine is at hand the life of the land starts up before your eyesin all its bareness and bitter stress. Here, in spite of the trimmingsand the frillings, it refuses to be subdued and the clamour and theclatter of it are loud above all other sounds--as sometimes the thunderof disorganised engines stops conversations along the decks of a liner,and in the inquiring eyes of the passengers you read the question--'Thisthing is made and paid to bear us to port quietly. Why does it not doso?' Only here, the rattle of the badly-put-together machine is alwaysin the ears, though men and women run about with labour-savingappliances and gospels of 'power through repose,' tinkering and oilingand making more noise. The machine is new. Some day it is going to bethe finest machine in the world. To the ranks of the amateur artificers,therefore, are added men with notebooks tapping at every nut andbolthead, fiddling with the glands, registering revolutions, and cryingout from time to time that this or that is or is not 'distinctivelyAmerican.' Meantime, men and women die unnecessarily in the wheels, andthey are said to have fallen 'in the battle of life.'

The God Who sees us all die knows that there is far too much of thatbattle, but we do not, and so continue worshipping the knife that cutsand the wheel that breaks us, as blindly as the outcast sweeper worshipsLal-Beg the Glorified Broom that is the incarnation of his craft. Butthe sweeper has sense enough not to kill himself, and to be proud of it,with sweeping.

A foreigner can do little good by talking of these things; for the samelean dry blood that breeds the fever of unrest breeds also the savageparochial pride that squeals under a steady stare or a pointed finger.Among themselves the people of the Eastern cities admit that they andtheir womenfolk overwork grievously and go to pieces very readily, andthat the consequences for the young stock are unpleasant indeed; butbefore the stranger they prefer to talk about the future of their mightycontinent (which has nothing to do with the case) and to call aloud onBaal of the Dollars--to catalogue their lines, mines, telephones, banks,and cities, and all the other shells, buttons, and counters that theyhave made their Gods over them. Now a nation does not progress upon itsbrain-pan, as some books would have us believe, but upon its belly asdid the Serpent of old; and in the very long run the work of the braincomes to be gathered in by a slow-footed breed that have unimaginativestomachs and the nerves that know their place.

All this is very consoling from the alien's point of view. He perceives,with great comfort, that out of strain is bred impatience in the shapeof a young bundle of nerves, who is about as undisciplined an imp as theearth can show. Out of impatience, grown up, habituated to violent andugly talk, and the impatience and recklessness of his neighbours, isbegotten lawlessness, encouraged by laziness and suppressed by violencewhen it becomes insupportable. Out of lawlessness is bred rebellion (andthat fruit has been tasted once already), and out of rebellion comesprofit to those who wait. He hears of the power of the People who,through rank slovenliness, neglect to see that their laws are soberlyenforced from the beginning; and these People, not once or twice in ayear, but many times within a month, go out in the open streets and, witha maximum waste of power and shouting, strangle other people with ropes.They are, he is told, law-abiding citizens who have executed 'the willof the people'; which is as though a man should leave his papersunsorted for a year and then smash his desk with an axe, crying, 'Am Inot orderly?' He hears lawyers, otherwise sane and matured, defend thispig-jobbing murder on the grounds that 'the People stand behind theLaw'--the law that they never administered. He sees a right, at presentonly half--but still half--conceded to anticipate the law in one's owninterests; and nervous impatience (always nerves) forejudging thesuspect in gaol, the prisoner in the dock, and the award between nationand nation ere it is declared. He knows that the maxim in London,Yokohama, and Hongkong in doing business with the pure-bred American isto keep him waiting, for the reason that forced inaction frets the manto a lather, as standing in harness frets a half-broken horse. He comesacross a thousand little peculiarities of speech, manner, andthought--matters of nerve and stomach developed by everlastingfriction--and they are all just the least little bit in the worldlawless. No more so than the restless clicking together of horns in aherd of restless cattle, but certainly no less. They are all good--goodfor those who wait.

On the other hand, to consider the matter more humanly, there arethousands of delightful men and women going to pieces for the pitifulreason that if they do not keep up with the procession, 'they are left.'And they are left--in clothes that have no back to them, among mounds ofsmilax. And young men--chance-met in the streets, talk to you abouttheir nerves which are things no young man should know anything about;and the friends of your friends go down with nervous prostration, andthe people overheard in the trains talk about their nerves and thenerves of their relatives; and the little children must needs have theirnerves attended to ere their milk-teeth are shed, and the middle-agedwomen and the middle-aged men have got them too, and the old men losethe dignity of their age in an indecent restlessness, and theadvertisements in the papers go to show that this sweeping list is nolie. Atop of the fret and the stampede, the tingling self-consciousnessof a new people makes them take a sort of perverted pride in the futileracket that sends up the death-rate--a child's delight in the blaze andthe dust of the March of Progress. Is it not 'distinctively American'?It is, and it is not. If the cities were all America, as they pretend,fifty years would see the March of Progress brought to a standstill, asa locomotive is stopped by heated bearings....

Down in the meadow the mowing-machine has checked, and the horses areshaking themselves. The last of the sunlight leaves the top ofMonadnock, and four miles away Main Street lights her electric lamps. Itis band-night in Main Street, and the folks from Putney, fromMarlboro', from Guildford, and even New Fane will drive in theirwell-filled waggons to hear music and look at the Ex-President. Over theshoulder of the meadow two men come up very slowly, their hats off andtheir arms swinging loosely at their sides. They do not hurry, they havenot hurried, and they never will hurry, for they are of country--bankersof the flesh and blood of the ever bankrupt cities. Their children mayyet be pale summer boarders; as the boarders, city-bred weeds, may takeover their farms. From the plough to the pavement goes man, but to theplough he returns at last.

'Going to supper?'

'Ye-ep,' very slowly across the wash of the uncut grass.

'Say, that corncrib wants painting.'

''Do that when we get around to it.'

They go off through the dusk, without farewell or salutation steadily astheir own steers. And there are a few millions of them--unhandy men tocross in their ways, set, silent, indirect in speech, and asimpenetrable as that other Eastern fanner who is the bedrock of anotherland. They do not appear in the city papers, they are not much heard inthe streets, and they tell very little in the outsider's estimate ofAmerica.

And _they_ are the American.

LEAVES FROM A WINTER NOTE-BOOK

(1895)

We had walked abreast of the year from the very beginning, and that waswhen the first blood-root came up between the patches of April snow,while yet the big drift at the bottom of the meadow held fast. In theshadow of the woods and under the blown pine-needles, clots of snow laytill far into May, but neither the season nor the flowers took any noteof them, and, before we were well sure Winter had gone, the lackeys ofmy Lord Baltimore in their new liveries came to tell us that Summer wasin the valley, and please might they nest at the bottom of the garden?

Followed, Summer, angry, fidgety, and nervous, with the corn and tobaccoto ripen in five short months, the pastures to reclothe, and the fallenleaves to hide away under new carpets. Suddenly, in the middle of herwork, on a stuffy-still July day, she called a wind out of theNorthwest, a wind blown under an arch of steel-bellied clouds, a wickedbitter wind with a lacing of hail to it, a wind that came and was gonein less than ten minutes, but blocked the roads with fallen trees,toppled over a barn, and--blew potatoes out of the ground! When that wasdone, a white cloud shaped like a dumb-bell whirled down the valleyacross the evening blue, roaring and twisting and twisting and roaringall alone by itself. A West Indian hurricane could not have been quickeron its feet than our little cyclone, and when the house rose a-tiptoe,like a cockerel in act to crow, and a sixty-foot elm went by the board,and that which had been a dusty road became a roaring torrent all inthree minutes, we felt that the New England summer had creole blood inher veins. She went away, red-faced and angry to the last, slamming allthe doors of the hills behind her, and Autumn, who is a lady, tookcharge.

No pen can describe the turning of the leaves--the insurrection of thetree-people against the waning year. A little maple began it, flamingblood-red of a sudden where he stood against the dark green of apine-belt. Next morning there was an answering signal from the swampwhere the sumacs grow. Three days later, the hill-sides as far as theeye could range were afire, and the roads paved, with crimson and gold.Then a wet wind blew, and ruined all the uniforms of that gorgeous army;and the oaks, who had held themselves in reserve, buckled on their dulland bronzed cuirasses and stood it out stiffly to the last blown leaf,till nothing remained but pencil-shading of bare boughs, and one couldsee into the most private heart of the woods.

Frost may be looked for till the middle of May and after the middle ofSeptember, so Summer has little time for enamel-work or leaf-embroidery.Her sisters bring the gifts--Spring, wind-flowers, Solomon's-Seal,Dutchman's-breeches, Quaker-ladies, and trailing arbutus, that smells asdivinely as the true May. Autumn has golden-rod and all the tribe ofasters, pink, lilac, and creamy white, by the double armful. When thesego the curtain comes down, and whatever Powers shift the scenery behind,work without noise. In tropic lands you can hear the play of growth anddecay at the back of the night-silences. Even in England the tides ofthe winter air have a set and a purpose; but here they are dumbaltogether. The very last piece of bench-work this season was thetrailed end of a blackberry-vine, most daringly conventionalised inhammered iron, flung down on the frosty grass an instant before peoplecame to look. The blue bloom of the furnace was still dying along thecentral rib, and the side-sprays were cherry red, even as they had beenlifted from the charcoal. It was a detail, evidently, of some invisiblegate in the woods; but we never found that workman, though he had leftthe mark of his cloven foot as plainly as any strayed deer. In a weekthe heavy frosts with scythes and hammers had slashed and knocked downall the road-side growth and the kindly bushes that veil the drop offthe unfenced track.

There the seasons stopped awhile. Autumn was gone, Winter was not. Wehad Time dealt out to us--mere, clear, fresh Time--grace-days to enjoy.The white wooden farm-houses were banked round two feet deep with driedleaves or earth, and the choppers went out to get ready next year'sstores of wood. Now, chopping is an art, and the chopper in all respectsan artist. He makes his own axe-helve, and for each man there is but oneperfect piece of wood in all the world. This he never finds, but thelikest substitute is trimmed and balanced and poised to that ideal. Oneman I know has evolved very nearly the weapon of Umslopogaas. It isalmost straight, lapped at the butt with leather, amazingly springy, andcarries a two-edged blade for splitting and chopping. If his Demon bewith him--and what artist can answer for all his moods?--he will cause atree to fall upon any stick or stone that you choose, uphill or down, tothe right or to the left. Artist-like, however, he explains that that isnothing. Any fool can play with a tree in the open, but it needs thecraftsman to bring a tree down in thick timber and do no harm. To see aneighty-foot maple, four feet in the butt, dropped, deftly as a fly iscast, in the only place where it will not outrage the feelings and swipeoff the tops of fifty juniors, is a revelation. White pine, hemlock, andspruce share this country with maples, black and white birches, andbeech. Maple seems to have few preferences, and the white birchesstraggle and shiver on the outskirts of every camp; but the pines holdtogether in solid regiments, sending out skirmishers to invade aneglected pasture on the first opportunity. There is no overcoat warmerthan the pines in a gale when the woods for miles round are singing likecathedral organs, and the first snow of the year powders therock-ledges.

The mosses and lichens, green, sulphur, and amber, stud the copper floorof needles, where the feathery ground-pine runs aimlessly to and froalong the ground, spelling out broken words of half-forgotten charms.There are checker-berries on the outskirts of the wood, where thepartridge (he is a ruffed grouse really) dines, and by the desertedlogging-roads toadstools of all colours sprout on the decayed stumps.Wherever a green or blue rock lifts from the hillside, the needles havebeen packed and matted round its base, till, when the sunshine catchesthem, stone and setting together look no meaner than turquoise in deadgold. The woods are full of colour, belts and blotches of it, thecolours of the savage--red, yellow, and blue. Yet in their lodges thereis very little life, for the wood-people do not readily go into theshadows. The squirrels have their business among the beeches andhickories by the road-side, where they can watch the traffic and talk.We have no gray ones hereabouts (they are good to eat and suffer forit), but five reds live in a hickory hard by, and no weather puts themto sleep. The wood-chuck, a marmot and a strategist, makes his burrow inthe middle of a field, where he must see you ere you see him. Now andagain a dog manages to cut him off his base, and the battle is worthcrossing fields to watch. But the woodchuck turned in long ago, and willnot be out till April. The coon lives--well, no one seems to knowparticularly where Brer Coon lives, but when the Hunter's Moon is largeand full he descends into the corn-lands, and men chase him with dogsfor his fur, which makes the finest kind of overcoat, and his flesh,which tastes like chicken. He cries at night sorrowfully as though achild were lost.

They seem to kill, for one reason or other, everything that moves inthis land. Hawks, of course; eagles for their rarity; foxes for theirpelts; red-shouldered blackbirds and Baltimore orioles because they arepretty, and the other small things for sport--French fashion. You canget a rifle of a kind for twelve shillings, and if your neighbour befool enough to post notices forbidding 'hunting' and fishing, younaturally seek his woods. So the country is very silent and unalive.

There are, however, bears within a few miles, as you will see from thisnotice, picked up at the local tobacconist's:

JOHNNY GET YOUR GUN! BEAR HUNT!

As bears are too numerous in the town of Peltyville Corners, Vt., thehunters of the surrounding towns are invited to participate in a grandhunt to be held on Blue Mountains in the town of Peltyville Corners,Vt., Wednesday, Nov. 8th, if pleasant. If not, first fine day. Come one,come all!

They went, but it was the bear that would not participate. The noticewas printed at somebody's Electric Print Establishment. Queer mixture,isn't it?

The bear does not run large as a rule, but he has a weakness for swineand calves which brings punishment. Twelve hours' rail and a littlemarching take you up to the moose-country; and twenty-odd miles fromhere as the crow flies you come to virgin timber, where trappers live,and where there is a Lost Pond that many have found once but can neverfind again.

Men, who are of one blood with sheep, have followed their friends andthe railway along the river valleys where the towns are. Across thehills the inhabitants are few, and, outside their State, little known.They withdraw from society in November if they live on the uplands,coming down in May as the snow gives leave. Not much more than ageneration ago these farms made their own clothes, soap, and candles,and killed their own meat thrice a year, beef, veal, and pig, and satstill between-times. Now they buy shop-made clothes, patent soaps, andkerosene; and it is among their tents that the huge red and giltBiographies of Presidents, and the twenty-pound family Bibles, withilluminated marriage-registers, mourning-cards, baptismal certificates,and hundreds of genuine steel-engravings, sell best. Here, too, off themain-travelled roads, the wandering quack--Patent Electric Pills, nervecures, etc.--divides the field with the seed and fruit man and theseller of cattle-boluses. They dose themselves a good deal, I fancy,for it is a poor family that does not know all about nervousprostration. So the quack drives a pair of horses and a gaily-paintedwaggon with a hood, and sometimes takes his wife with him. Once onlyhave I met a pedlar afoot. He was an old man, shaken with palsy, and hepushed a thing exactly like a pauper's burial-cart, selling pins, tape,scents, and flavourings. You helped yourself, for his hands had nodirection, and he told a long tale in which the deeding away of a farmto one of his family was mixed up with pride at the distances he stillcould cover daily. As much as six miles sometimes. He was no Lear, asthe gift of the farm might suggest, but sealed of the tribe of theWandering Jew--a tremulous old giddy-gaddy. There are many such rovers,gelders of colts and the like, who work a long beat, south to Virginiaalmost, and north to the frontier, paying with talk and gossip for theirentertainment.

Yet tramps are few, and that is well, for the American article answersalmost exactly to the vagrant and criminal tribes of India, being apredatory ruffian who knows too much to work. 'Bad place to beg in afterdark--on a farm--very--is Vermont. Gypsies pitch their camp by the riverin the spring, and cooper horses in the manner of their tribe. They havethe gypsy look and some of the old gypsy names, but say that they arelargely mixed with Gentile blood.

Winter has chased all these really interesting people south, and in afew weeks, if we have anything of a snow, the back farms will beunvisited save by the doctor's hooded sleigh. It is no child's play tohold a practice here through the winter months, when the drifts arereally formed, and a pair can drop in up to their saddle-pads. Fourhorses a day some of them use, and use up--for they are good men.

Now in the big silence of the snow is born, perhaps, not a little ofthat New England conscience which her children write about. There ismuch time to think, and thinking is a highly dangerous business.Conscience, fear, undigested reading, and, it may be, not too wellcooked food, have full swing. A man, and more particularly a woman, caneasily hear strange voices--the Word of the Lord rolling between thedead hills; may see visions and dream dreams; get revelations and anoutpouring of the spirit, and end (such things have been) lamentablyenough in those big houses by the Connecticut River which have beentenderly christened The Retreat. Hate breeds as well as religion--thedeep, instriking hate between neighbours, that is born of a hundredlittle things added up, brooded over, and hatched by the stove when twoor three talk together in the long evenings. It would be veryinteresting to get the statistics of revivals and murders, and find howmany of them have been committed in the spring. But for undistractedpeople winter is one long delight of the eye. In other lands one knowsthe snow as a nuisance that comes and goes, and is sorely man-handledand messed at the last. Here it lies longer on the ground than anycrop--from November to April sometimes--and for three months life goesto the tune of sleigh-bells, which are not, as a Southern visitor oncehinted, ostentation, but safeguards. The man who drives without them isnot loved. The snow is a faithful barometer, foretelling good sleighingor stark confinement to barracks. It is all the manure the stonypastures receive; it cloaks the ground and prevents the frost burstingpipes; it is the best--I had almost written the only--road-maker in theStates. On the other side it can rise up in the night and bid the peoplesit still as the Egyptians. It can stop mails; wipe out all time-tables;extinguish the lamps of twenty towns, and kill man within sight of hisown door-step or hearing of his cattle unfed. No one who has beenthrough even so modified a blizzard as New England can produce talkslightly of the snow. Imagine eight-and-forty hours of roaring wind, thethermometer well down towards zero, scooping and gouging across ahundred miles of newly fallen snow. The air is full of stinging shot,and at ten yards the trees are invisible. The foot slides on a reef,polished and black as obsidian, where the wind has skinned an exposedcorner of road down to the dirt ice of early winter. The next step endship-deep and over, for here an unseen wall is banking back the rush ofthe singing drifts. A scarped slope rises sheer across the road. Thewind shifts a point or two, and all sinks down, like sand in thehour-glass, leaving a pot-hole of whirling whiteness. There is a lull,and you can see the surface of the fields settling furiously in onedirection--a tide that spurts from between the tree-boles. The hollowsof the pasture fill while you watch; empty, fill, and discharge anew.The rock-ledges show the bare flank of a storm-chased liner for amoment, and whitening, duck under. Irresponsible snow-devils dance bythe lee of a barn where three gusts meet, or stagger out into the opentill they are cut down by the main wind. At the worst of the storm thereis neither Heaven nor Earth, but only a swizzle into which a man may bebrewed. Distances grow to nightmare scale, and that which in the summerwas no more than a minute's bare-headed run, is half an hour's gaspingstruggle, each foot won between the lulls. Then do the heavy-timberedbarns talk like ships in a cross-sea, beam working against beam. Thewinter's hay is ribbed over with long lines of snow dust blown betweenthe boards, and far below in the byre the oxen clash their horns andmoan uneasily.

The next day is blue, breathless, and most utterly still. The farmersshovel a way to their beasts, bind with chains their large ploughsharesto their heaviest wood-sled and take of oxen as many as Allah has giventhem. These they drive, and the dragging share makes a furrow in which ahorse can walk, and the oxen, by force of repeatedly going in up totheir bellies, presently find foothold. The finished road is a deepdouble gutter between three-foot walls of snow, where, by custom, theheavier vehicle has the right of way. The lighter man when he turns outmust drop waist-deep and haul his unwilling beast into the drift,leaving Providence to steady the sleigh.

In the towns, where they choke and sputter and gasp, the big snow turnsto horsepondine. With us it stays still: but wind, sun, and rain get towork upon it, lest the texture and colour should not change daily. Rainmakes a granulated crust over all, in which white shagreen the trees arefaintly reflected. Heavy mists go up and down, and create a sort ofmirage, till they settle and pack round the iron-tipped hills, and thenyou know how the moon must look to an inhabitant of it. At twilight,again, the beaten-down ridges and laps and folds of the uplands take onthe likeness of wet sand--some huge and melancholy beach at the world'send--and when day meets night it is all goblin country. To westward; thelast of the spent day--rust-red and pearl, illimitable levels of shorewaiting for the tide to turn again. To eastward, black night among thevalleys, and on the rounded hill slopes a hard glaze that is not so muchlight as snail-slime from the moon. Once or twice perhaps in the winterthe Northern Lights come out between the moon and the sun, so that tothe two unearthly lights is added the leap and flare of the AuroraBorealis.

In January or February come the great ice-storms, when every branch,blade, and trunk is coated with frozen rain, so that you can touchnothing truly. The spikes of the pines are sunk into pear-shapedcrystals, and each fence-post is miraculously hilted with diamonds. Ifyou bend a twig, the icing cracks like varnish, and a half-inch branchsnaps off at the lightest tap. If wind and sun open the day together,the eye cannot look steadily at the splendour of this jewelry. The woodsare full of the clatter of arms; the ringing of bucks' horns in flight;the stampede of mailed feet up and down the glades; and a great dust ofbattle is puffed out into the open, till the last of the ice is beatenaway and the cleared branches take up their regular chant.

Again the mercury drops twenty and more below zero, and the very treesswoon. The snow turns to French chalk, squeaking under the heel, andtheir breath cloaks the oxen in rime. At night a tree's heart will breakin him with a groan. According to the books, the frost has splitsomething, but it is a fearful sound, this grunt as of a man stunned.

Winter that is winter in earnest does not allow cattle and horses toplay about the fields, so everything comes home; and since no share canbreak ground to any profit for some five months, there would seem to bevery little to do. As a matter of fact, country interests at all seasonsare extensive and peculiar, and the day is not long enough for them whenyou take out that time which a self-respecting man needs to turn himselfround in. Consider! The solid undisturbed hours stand about one likeramparts. At a certain time the sun will rise. At another hour, equallycertain, he will set. This much we know. Why, in the name of Reason,therefore, should we vex ourselves with vain exertions? An occasionalvisitor from the Cities of the Plains comes up panting to do things. Heis set down to listen to the normal beat of his own heart--a sound thatvery few men have heard. In a few days, when the lather of impatiencehas dried off, he ceases to talk of 'getting there' or 'being left.' Hedoes not desire to accomplish matters 'right away,' nor does he look athis watch from force of habit, but keeps it where it should be--in hisstomach. At the last he goes back to his beleaguered city, unwillingly,partially civilised, soon to be resavaged by the clash of a thousandwars whose echo does not reach here.

The air which kills germs dries out the very newspapers. They might beof to-morrow or a hundred years ago. They have nothing to do withto-day--the long, full, sunlit to-day. Our interests are not on the samescale as theirs, perhaps, but much more complex. The movement of aforeign power--an alien sleigh on this Pontic shore--must be explainedand accounted for, or this public's heart will burst with unsatisfiedcuriosity. If it be Buck Davis, with the white mare that he traded hiscolt for, and the practically new sleigh-robe that he bought at theSewell auction, _why_ does Buck Davis, who lives on the river flats,cross our hills, unless Murder Hollow be blockaded with snow, or unlesshe has turkeys for sale? _But_ Buck Davis with turkeys would surelyhave stopped here, unless he were selling a large stock in town. A wailfrom the sacking at the back of the sleigh tells the tale. It is awinter calf, and Buck Davis is going to sell it for one dollar to theBoston Market where it will be turned into potted chicken. This leavesthe mystery of his change of route unexplained. After two days' sittingon tenter-hooks it is discovered, obliquely, that Buck went to pay adoor-yard call on Orson Butler, who lives on the saeter where the windand the bald granite scaurs fight it out together. Kirk Demming hadbrought Orson news of a fox at the back of Black Mountain, and Orson'seldest son, going to Murder Hollow with wood for the new barn floor thatthe widow Amidon is laying down, told Buck that he might as well comeround to talk to his father about the pig. _But_ old man Butler meantfox-hunting from the first, and what he wanted to do was to borrowBuck's dog, who had been duly brought over with the calf, and left onthe mountain. No old man Butler did _not_ go hunting alone, but waitedtill Buck came back from town. Buck sold the calf for a dollar and aquarter and not for seventy-five cents as was falsely asserted byinterested parties. _Then_ the two went after the fox together. Thismuch learned, everybody breathes freely, if life has not beencomplicated in the meantime by more strange counter-marchings.

Five or six sleighs a day we can understand, if we know why they areabroad; but any metropolitan rush of traffic disturbs and excites.

LETTERS TO THE FAMILY

1908

These letters appeared in newspapers during the spring of 1908, after atrip to Canada undertaken in the autumn of 1907. They are now reprintedwithout alteration.

THE ROAD TO QUEBEC.A PEOPLE AT HOME.CITIES AND SPACES.NEWSPAPERS AND DEMOCRACY.LABOUR.THE FORTUNATE TOWNS.MOUNTAINS AND THE PACIFIC.A CONCLUSION.

* * * * *

THE ROAD TO QUEBEC

(1907)

It must be hard for those who do not live there to realise the crossbetween canker and blight that has settled on England for the lastcouple of years. The effects of it are felt throughout the Empire, butat headquarters we taste the stuff in the very air, just as one tastesiodoform in the cups and bread-and-butter of a hospital-tea. So far asone can come at things in the present fog, every form of unfitness,general or specialised, born or created, during the last generation hascombined in one big trust--a majority of all the minorities--to play thegame of Government. Now that the game ceases to amuse, nine-tenths ofthe English who set these folk in power are crying, 'If we had onlyknown what they were going to do we should never have voted for them!'

Yet, as the rest of the Empire perceived at the time, these men werealways perfectly explicit as to their emotions and intentions. They saidfirst, and drove it home by large pictures, that no possible advantageto the Empire outweighed the cruelty and injustice of charging theBritish working man twopence halfpenny a week on some of his provisions.Incidentally they explained, so that all Earth except England heard it,that the Army was wicked; much of the Navy unnecessary; that half thepopulation of one of the Colonies practised slavery, with torture, forthe sake of private gain, and that the mere name of Empire wearied andsickened them. On these grounds they stood to save England; on thesegrounds they were elected, with what seemed like clear orders to destroythe blood-stained fetish of Empire as soon as possible. The presentmellow condition of Ireland, Egypt, India, and South Africa is proof oftheir honesty and obedience. Over and above this, their mere presence inoffice produced all along our lines the same moral effect as thepresence of an incompetent master in a classroom. Paper pellets, books,and ink began to fly; desks were thumped; dirty pens were jabbed intothose trying to work; rats and mice were set free amid squeals ofexaggerated fear; and, as usual, the least desirable characters in theforms were loudest to profess noble sentiments, and most eloquent griefat being misjudged. Still, the English are not happy, and the unrest andslackness increase.

On the other hand, which is to our advantage, the isolation of the unfitin one political party has thrown up the extremists in what the Babucalled 'all their naked _cui bono_.' These last are after satisfying thetwo chief desires of primitive man by the very latest gadgets inscientific legislation. But how to get free food, and free--shall wesay--love? within the four corners of an Act of Parliament withoutgiving the game away too grossly, worries them a little. It is easyenough to laugh at this, but we are all so knit together nowadays that arot at what is called 'headquarters' may spread like bubonic, with everysteamer. I went across to Canada the other day, for a few weeks, mainlyto escape the Blight, and also to see what our Eldest Sister was doing.Have you ever noticed that Canada has to deal in the lump with most ofthe problems that afflict us others severally? For example, she has theDouble-Language, Double-Law, Double-Politics drawback in a worse formthan South Africa, because, unlike our Dutch, her French cannot wellmarry outside their religion, and they take their orders fromItaly--less central, sometimes, than Pretoria or Stellenbosch. She has,too, something of Australia's labour fuss, minus Australia's isolation,but plus the open and secret influence of 'Labour' entrenched, witharms, and high explosives on neighbouring soil. To complete theparallel, she keeps, tucked away behind mountains, a trifle of landcalled British Columbia, which resembles New Zealand; and New Zealanderswho do not find much scope for young enterprise in their own country aredrifting up to British Columbia already.

Canada has in her time known calamity more serious than floods, frost,drought, and fire--and has macadamized some stretches of her road towardnationhood with the broken hearts of two generations. That is why onecan discuss with Canadians of the old stock matters which an Australianor New Zealander could no more understand than a wealthy childunderstands death. Truly we are an odd Family! Australia and New Zealand(the Maori War not counted) got everything for nothing. South Africagave everything and got less than nothing. Canada has given and takenall along the line for nigh on three hundred years, and in some respectsis the wisest, as she should be the happiest, of us all. She seems to becuriously unconscious of her position in the Empire, perhaps because shehas lately been talked at, or down to, by her neighbours. You know howat any gathering of our men from all quarters it is tacitly concededthat Canada takes the lead in the Imperial game. To put it roughly, shesaw the goal more than ten years ago, and has been working the balltoward it ever since. That is why her inaction at the last ImperialConference made people who were interested in the play wonder why she,of all of us, chose to brigade herself with General Botha and to blockthe forward rush. I, too, asked that question of many. The answer wassomething like this: 'We saw that England wasn't taking anything justthen. Why should we have laid ourselves open to be snubbed worse than wewere? We sat still.' Quite reasonable--almost too convincing. There wasreally no need that Canada should have done other than she did--exceptthat she was the Eldest Sister, and more was expected of her. She is alittle too modest.

We discussed this, first of all, under the lee of a wet deck-house inmid-Atlantic; man after man cutting in and out of the talk as he suckedat his damp tobacco. The passengers were nearly all unmixed Canadian,mostly born in the Maritime Provinces, where their fathers speak of'Canada' as Sussex speaks of 'England,' but scattered about theirbusinesses throughout the wide Dominion. They were at ease, too, amongthemselves, with that pleasant intimacy that stamps every branch of OurFamily and every boat that it uses on its homeward way. A Cape liner isall the sub-Continent from the Equator to Simon's Town; an Orient boatis Australasian throughout, and a C.P.R. steamer cannot be confused withanything except Canada. It is a pity one may not be born in four placesat once, and then one would understand the half-tones and asides, andthe allusions of all our Family life without waste of precious time.These big men, smoking in the drizzle, had hope in their eyes, belief intheir tongues, and strength in their hearts. I used to think miserablyof other boats at the South end of this ocean--a quarter full of peopledeprived of these things. A young man kindly explained to me how Canadahad suffered through what he called 'the Imperial connection'; how shehad been diversely bedevilled by English statesmen for politicalreasons. He did not know his luck, nor would he believe me when I triedto point it out; but a nice man in a plaid (who knew South Africa)lurched round the corner and fell on him with facts and imagery whichastonished the patriotic young mind. The plaid finished his outburstwith the uncontradicted statement that the English were mad. All ourtalks ended on that note.

It was an experience to move in the midst of a new contempt. Oneunderstands and accepts the bitter scorn of the Dutch, the hopelessanger of one's own race in South Africa is also part of the burden; butthe Canadian's profound, sometimes humorous, often bewildered, alwayspolite contempt of the England of to-day cuts a little. You see, thatlate unfashionable war[3] was very real to Canada. She sent several mento it, and a thinly-populated country is apt to miss her dead more thana crowded one. When, from her point of view, they have died for noconceivable advantage, moral or material, her business instincts, or itmay be mere animal love of her children, cause her to remember andresent quite a long time after the thing should be decently forgotten. Iwas shocked at the vehemence with which some men (and women) spoke ofthe affair. Some of them went so far as to discuss--on the ship andelsewhere--whether England would stay in the Family or whether, as someeminent statesman was said to have asserted in private talk, she wouldcut the painter to save expense. One man argued, without any heat, thatshe would not so much break out of the Empire in one flurry, aspolitically vend her children one by one to the nearest Power thatthreatened her comfort; the sale of each case to be preceded by asteady blast of abuse of the chosen victim. He quoted--really thesepeople have viciously long memories!--the five-year campaign of abuseagainst South Africans as a precedent and a warning.

[Footnote 3: Boer 'war' of 1899-1902.]

Our Tobacco Parliament next set itself to consider by what means, ifthis happened, Canada could keep her identity unsubmerged; and that ledto one of the most curious talks I have ever heard. It seemed to bedecided that she might--just might--pull through by the skin of herteeth as a nation--if (but this was doubtful) England did not helpothers to hammer her. Now, twenty years ago one would not have heard anyof this sort of thing. If it sounds a little mad, remember that theMother Country was throughout considered as a lady in violent hysterics.

Just at the end of the talk one of our twelve or thirteen hundredsteerage-passengers leaped overboard, ulstered and booted, into aconfused and bitter cold sea. Every horror in the world has its fittingritual. For the fifth time--and four times in just such weather--I heardthe screw stop; saw our wake curve like a whiplash as the great townshipwrenched herself round; the lifeboat's crew hurry to the boat-deck; thebare-headed officer race up the shrouds and look for any sign of thepoor head that had valued itself so lightly. A boat amid waves can seenothing. There was nothing to see from the first. We waited andquartered the ground back and forth for a long hour, while the rain felland the seas slapped along our sides, and the steam fluttered drearilythrough the escapes. Then we went ahead.

The St. Lawrence on the last day of the voyage played up nobly. Themaples along its banks had turned--blood red and splendid as the bannersof lost youth. Even the oak is not more of a national tree than themaple, and the sight of its welcome made the folks aboard still morehappy. A dry wind brought along all the clean smell of theirContinent-mixed odours of sawn lumber, virgin earth, and wood-smoke; andthey snuffed it, and their eyes softened as they, identified point afterpoint along their own beloved River--places where they played and fishedand amused themselves in holiday time. It must be pleasant to have acountry of one's very own to show off. Understand, they did not in anyway boast, shout, squeak, or exclaim, these even-voiced returned men andwomen. They were simply and unfeignedly glad to see home again, and theysaid: 'Isn't it lovely? Don't you think it's beautiful? We love it.'

At Quebec there is a sort of place, much infested by locomotives, like acoal-chute, whence rise the heights that Wolfe's men scaled on their wayto the Plains of Abraham. Perhaps of all the tide-marks in all our landsthe affair of Quebec touches the heart and the eye more nearly than anyother. Everything meets there; France, the jealous partner of England'sglory by land and sea for eight hundred years; England, bewildered asusual, but for a wonder not openly opposing Pitt, who knew; those otherpeople, destined to break from England as soon as the French peril wasremoved; Montcalm himself, doomed and resolute; Wolfe, the inevitabletrained workman appointed for the finish; and somewhere in thebackground one James Cook, master of H.M.S. _Mercury_, making beautifuland delicate charts of the St. Lawrence River.

For these reasons the Plains of Abraham are crowned with all sorts ofbeautiful things--including a jail and a factory. Montcalm's left wingis marked by the jail, and Wolfe's right by the factory. There is,happily, now a movement on foot to abolish these adornments and turn thebattle-field and its surroundings into a park, which by nature andassociation would be one of the most beautiful in our world.

Yet, in spite of jails on the one side and convents on the other and thethin black wreck of the Quebec Railway Bridge, lying like a dumpedcar-load of tin cans in the river, the Eastern Gate to Canada is noblewith a dignity beyond words. We saw it very early, when the under sidesof the clouds turned chilly pink over a high-piled, brooding,dusky-purple city. Just at the point of dawn, what looked like theSultan Harun-al-Raschid's own private shallop, all spangled withcoloured lights, stole across the iron-grey water, and disappeared intothe darkness of a slip. She came out again in three minutes, but thefull day had come too; so she snapped off her masthead, steering andcabin electrics, and turned into a dingy white ferryboat, full of coldpassengers. I spoke to a Canadian about her. 'Why, she's the oldSo-and-So, to Port Levis,' he answered, wondering as the Cockney wonderswhen a stranger stares at an Inner Circle train. This was _his_ InnerCircle--the Zion where he was all at ease. He drew my attention tostately city and stately river with the same tranquil pride that we eachfeel when the visitor steps across our own threshold, whether that beSouthampton Water on a grey, wavy morning; Sydney Harbour with a regattain full swing; or Table Mountain, radiant and new-washed after theChristmas rains. He had, quite rightly, felt personally responsible forthe weather, and every flaming stretch of maple since we had entered theriver. (The North-wester in these parts is equivalent to theSouth-easter elsewhere, and may impress a guest unfavourably.)

Then the autumn sun rose, and the man smiled. Personally and politicallyhe said he loathed the city--but it was his.

'Well,' he asked at last, 'what do you think? Not so bad?'

'Oh no. Not at all so bad,' I answered; and it wasn't till much laterthat I realised that we had exchanged the countersign which runs clearround the Empire.

A PEOPLE AT HOME

An up-country proverb says, 'She was bidden to the wedding and set downto grind corn.' The same fate, reversed, overtook me on my littleexcursion. There is a crafty network of organisations of business mencalled Canadian Clubs. They catch people who look interesting, assembletheir members during the mid-day lunch-hour, and, tying the victim to asteak, bid him discourse on anything that he thinks he knows. The ideamight be copied elsewhere, since it takes men out of themselves tolisten to matters not otherwise coming under their notice and, at thesame time, does not hamper their work. It is safely short, too. Thewhole affair cannot exceed an hour, of which the lunch fills half. TheClubs print their speeches annually, and one gets cross-sections of manyinteresting questions--from practical forestry to State mints--all setout by experts.

Not being an expert, the experience, to me, was very like hard work.Till then I had thought speech-making was a sort of conversationalwhist, that any one could cut in at it. I perceive now that it is an Artof conventions remote from anything that comes out of an inkpot, and ofcolours hard to control. The Canadians seem to like listening tospeeches, and, though this is by no means a national vice, they makegood oratory on occasion. You know the old belief that the white man onbrown, red, or black lands, will throw back in manner and instinct tothe type originally bred there? Thus, a speech in the taal should carrythe deep roll, the direct belly-appeal, the reiterated, cunningarguments, and the few simple metaphors of the prince of commercialorators, the Bantu. A New Zealander is said to speak from his diaphragm,hands clenched at the sides, as the old Maoris used. What we know offirst-class Australian oratory shows us the same alertness, swiftflight, and clean delivery as a thrown boomerang. I had half expected inCanadian speeches some survival of the Redskin's elaborate appeal toSuns, Moons, and Mountains--touches of grandiosity and ceremonialinvocations. But nothing that I heard was referable to any primitivestock. There was a dignity, a restraint, and, above all, a weight in it,rather curious when one thinks of the influences to which the land liesopen. Red it was not; French it was not; but a thing as much by itselfas the speakers.

So with the Canadian's few gestures and the bearing of his body. Duringthe (Boer) war one watched the contingents from every point of view,and, most likely, drew wrong inferences. It struck me then that theCanadian, even when tired, slacked off less than the men from the hotcountries, and while resting did not lie on his back or his belly, butrather on his side, a leg doubled under him, ready to rise in one surge.

This time while I watched assemblies seated, men in hotels andpassers-by, I fancied that he kept this habit of semi-tenseness at homeamong his own; that it was the complement of the man's stillcountenance, and his even, lowered voice. Looking at their footmarks onthe ground they seem to throw an almost straight track, neither splayednor in-toed, and to set their feet down with a gentle forward pressure,rather like the Australian's stealthy footfall. Talking amongthemselves, or waiting for friends, they did not drum with theirfingers, fiddle with their feet, or feel the hair on their faces. Thesethings seem trivial enough, but when breeds are in the making everythingis worth while. A man told me once--but I never tried theexperiment--that each of our Four Races light and handle fire in theirown way.

Small wonder we differ! Here is a people with no people at their backs,driving the great world-plough which wins the world's bread up and upover the shoulder of the world--a spectacle, as it might be, out of sometremendous Norse legend. North of them lies Niflheim's enduring cold,with the flick and crackle of the Aurora for Bifrost Bridge that Odinand the Aesir visited. These people also go north year by year, and dragaudacious railways with them. Sometimes they burst into good wheat ortimber land, sometimes into mines of treasure, and all the North isfoil of voices--as South Africa was once--telling discoveries and makingprophecies.

When their winter comes, over the greater part of this country outsidethe cities they must sit still, and eat and drink as the Aesir did. Insummer they cram twelve months' work into six, because between such andsuch dates certain far rivers will shut, and, later, certain others,till, at last, even the Great Eastern Gate at Quebec locks, and men mustgo in and out by the side-doors at Halifax and St. John. These areconditions that make for extreme boldness, but not for extravagantboastings.

The maples tell when it is time to finish, and all work in hand isregulated by their warning signal. Some jobs can be put through beforewinter; others must be laid aside ready to jump forward without a lostminute in spring. Thus, from Quebec to Calgary a note of drive--nothustle, but drive and finish-up--hummed like the steam-threshers on thestill, autumn air.

Hunters and sportsmen were coming in from the North; prospectors withthem, their faces foil of mystery, their pockets full of samples, likeprospectors the world over. They had already been wearing wolf and coonskin coats. In the great cities which work the year round,carriage--shops exhibited one or two seductive nickel-plated sledges, asa hint; for the sleigh is 'the chariot at hand here of Love.' In thecountry the farmhouses were stacking up their wood-piles within reach ofthe kitchen door, and taking down the fly-screens, (One leaves theseon, as a rule, till the double windows are brought up from the cellar,and one has to hunt all over the house for missing screws.) Sometimesone saw a few flashing lengths of new stovepipe in a backyard, andpitied the owner. There is no humour in the old, bitter-true stovepipejests of the comic papers.

But the railways--the wonderful railways--told the winter's tale mostemphatically. The thirty-ton coal cars were moving over three thousandmiles of track. They grunted and lurched against each other in theswitch-yards, or thumped past statelily at midnight on their way toprovident housekeepers of the prairie towns. It was not a clear wayeither; for the bacon, the lard, the apples, the butter, and the cheese,in beautiful whitewood barrels, were rolling eastwards toward thesteamers before the wheat should descend on them. That is the fifth actof the great Year-Play for which the stage must be cleared. On scores ofcongested sidings lay huge girders, rolled beams, limbs, and boxes ofrivets, once intended for the late Quebec Bridge--now so much mereobstruction--and the victuals had to pick their way through 'em; andbehind the victuals was the lumber--clean wood out of themountains--logs, planks, clapboards, and laths, for which we pay suchsinful prices in England--all seeking the sea. There was housing, food,and fuel for millions, on wheels together, and never a grain yet shiftedof the real staple which men for five hundred miles were threshing outin heaps as high as fifty-pound villas.

Add to this, that the railways were concerned for their own newdevelopments--double-trackings, loops, cutoffs, taps, and feeder lines,and great swoops out into untouched lands soon to be filled with men. Sothe construction, ballast, and material trains, the grading machines,the wrecking cars with their camel-like sneering cranes--the whole plantof a new civilisation--had to find room somewhere in the general rallybefore Nature cried, 'Lay off!'

Does any one remember that joyful strong confidence after the war, whenit seemed that, at last, South Africa was to be developed--when men laidout railways, and gave orders for engines, and fresh rolling-stock, andlabour, and believed gloriously in the future? It is true the hope wasmurdered afterward, but--multiply that good hour by a thousand, and youwill have some idea of how it feels to be in Canada--a place which evenan 'Imperial' Government cannot kill. I had the luck to be shown somethings from the inside--to listen to the details of works projected; therecord of works done. Above all, I saw what had actually been achievedin the fifteen years since I had last come that way. One advantage of anew land is that it makes you feel older than Time. I met cities wherethere had been nothing--literally, absolutely nothing, except, as thefairy tales say, 'the birds crying, and the grass waving in the wind.'Villages and hamlets had grown to great towns, and the great townsthemselves had trebled and quadrupled. And the railways rubbed theirhands and cried, like the Afrites of old, 'Shall we make a city whereno city is; or render flourishing a city that is dasolate?' They do ittoo, while, across the water, gentlemen, never forced to suffer oneday's physical discomfort in all their lives, pipe up and say, 'Howgrossly materialistic!'

I wonder sometimes whether any eminent novelist, philosopher, dramatist,or divine of to-day has to exercise half the pure imagination, not tomention insight, endurance, and self-restraint, which is acceptedwithout comment in what is called 'the material exploitation' of a newcountry. Take only the question of creating a new city at the junctionof two lines--all three in the air. The mere drama of it, the play ofthe human virtues, would fill a book. And when the work is finished,when the city is, when the new lines embrace a new belt of farms, andthe tide of the Wheat has rolled North another unexpected degree, themen who did it break off, without compliments, to repeat the jokeelsewhere.

I had some talk with a youngish man whose business it was to trainavalanches to jump clear of his section of the track. Thor went toJotunheim only once or twice, and he had his useful hammer Miolnr withhim. This Thor lived in Jotunheim among the green-ice-crowned peaks ofthe Selkirks--where if you disturb the giants at certain seasons of theyear, by making noises, they will sit upon you and all your fineemotions. So Thor watches them glaring under the May sun, or dull anddoubly dangerous beneath the spring rains. He wards off their strokeswith enormous brattices of wood, wing-walls of logs bolted together, andsuch other contraptions as experience teaches. He bears the giants nomalice; they do their work, he his. What bothers him a little is thatthe wind of their blows sometimes rips pines out of the oppositehill-sides--explodes, as it were, a whole valley. He thinks, however, hecan fix things so as to split large avalanches into little ones.

Another man, to whom I did not talk, sticks in my memory. He had foryears and years inspected trains at the head of a heavyish grade in themountains--though not half so steep as the Hex[4]--where all brakes arejammed home, and the cars slither warily for ten miles. Tire-troublesthere would be inconvenient, so he, as the best man, is given theheaviest job--monotony and responsibility combined. He did me the honourof wanting to speak to me, but first he inspected his train--on allfours with a hammer. By the time he was satisfied of the integrity ofthe underpinnings it was time for us to go; and all that I got was afriendly wave of the hand--a master craftsman's sign, you might call it.

[Footnote 4: Hex River, South Africa.]

Canada seems full of this class of materialist.

Which reminds me that the other day I saw the Lady herself in the shapeof a tall woman of twenty-five or six, waiting for her tram on a streetcorner. She wore her almost flaxen-gold hair waved, and parted low onthe forehead, beneath a black astrachan toque, with a red enamelmaple-leaf hatpin in one side of it. This was the one touch of colourexcept the flicker of a buckle on the shoe. The dark, tailor-made dresshad no trinkets or attachments, but fitted perfectly. She stood forperhaps a minute without any movement, both hands--right bare, leftgloved--hanging naturally at her sides, the very fingers still, theweight of the superb body carried evenly on both feet, and the profile,which was that of Gudrun or Aslauga, thrown out against a dark stonecolumn. What struck me most, next to the grave, tranquil eyes, was herslow, unhurried breathing in the hurry about her. She was evidently aregular fare, for when her tram stopped she smiled at the luckyconductor; and the last I saw of her was a flash of the sun on the redmaple-leaf, the full face still lighted by that smile, and her hair verypale gold against the dead black fur. But the power of the mouth, thewisdom of the brow, the human comprehension of the eyes, and theoutstriking vitality of the creature remained. That is how _I_ wouldhave my country drawn, were I a Canadian--and hung in Ottawa ParliamentHouse, for the discouragement of prevaricators.

CITIES AND SPACES

What would you do with a magic carpet if one were lent you? I askbecause for a month we had a private car of our very own--a triflingaffair less than seventy foot long and thirty ton weight. 'You may findher useful,' said the donor casually, 'to knock about the country. Hitchon to any train you choose and stop off where you choose.'

So she bore us over the C.P.R. from the Atlantic to the Pacific andback, and when we had no more need of her, vanished like the mango treeafter the trick.

A private car, though many books have been written in it, is hardly thebest place from which to study a country, unless it happen that you havekept house and seen the seasons round under normal conditions on thesame continent. Then you know how the cars look from the houses; whichis not in the least as the houses look from the cars. Then, the veryporter's brush in its nickel clip, the long cathedral-like aisle betweenthe well-known green seats, the toll of the bell and the deep organ-likenote of the engine wake up memories; and every sight, smell, and soundoutside are like old friends remembering old days together. A piano-topbuggy on a muddy, board-sidewalked street, all cut up by the narrowtires; the shingling at the corner of a veranda on a new-built house; abroken snake-fence girdling an old pasture of mulleins and skull-headedboulders; a wisp of Virginia creeper dying splendidly on the edge of apatch of corn; half a dozen panels of snow-fence above a cutting, oreven a shameless patent-medicine advertisement, yellow on the black of atobacco-barn, can make the heart thump and the eyes fill if the beholderhave only touched the life of which they are part. What must they meanto the native-born? There was a prairie-bred girl on the train, comingback after a year on the Continent, for whom the pine-belted hills, withreal mountains behind, the solemn loops of the river, and the intimatefriendly farm had nothing to tell.

'You can do these landscapes better in Italy,' she explained, and, withthe indescribable gesture of plains folk stifled in broken ground, 'Iwant to push these hills away and get into the open again! I'mWinnipeg.'

She would have understood that Hanover Road schoolmistress, back from avisit to Cape Town, whom I once saw drive off into thirty miles ofmirage almost shouting, 'Thank God, here's something like home at last.'

Other people ricochetted from side to side of the car, reviving this,rediscovering that, anticipating t'other thing, which, sure enough, slidround the next curve to meet them, caring nothing if all the world knewthey were home again; and the newly arrived Englishman with his largewooden packing-cases marked 'Settlers' Effects' had no more part in theshow than a new boy his first day at school. But two years in Canada andone run home will make him free of the Brotherhood in Canada as it doesanywhere else. He may grumble at certain aspects of the life, lamentcertain richnesses only to be found in England, but as surely as hegrumbles so surely he returns to the big skies, and the big chances. Thefailures are those who complain that the land 'does not know a gentlemanwhen it sees him.' They are quite right. The land suspends all judgmenton all men till it has seen them work. Thereafter as may be; but workthey must because there is a very great deal to be done.

Unluckily the railroads which made the country are bringing in personswho are particular as to the nature and amenities of their work, and ifso be they do not find precisely what they are looking for, theycomplain in print which makes all men seem equal.

The special joy of our trip lay in having travelled the line when it wasnew and, like the Canada of those days, not much believed in, when allthe high and important officials, whose little fingers unhooked cars,were also small and disregarded. To-day, things, men, and cities weredifferent, and the story of the line mixed itself up with the story ofthe country, the while the car-wheels clicked out, 'John Kino--JohnKino! Nagasaki, Yokohama, Hakodate, Heh!' for we were following in thewake of the Imperial Limited, all full of Hongkong and Treaty Ports men.There were old, known, and wonderfully grown cities to be looked atbefore we could get away to the new work out west, and, 'What d'youthink of this building and that suburb?' they said, imperiously. 'Comeout and see what has been done in this generation.'

The impact of a Continent is rather overwhelming till you remindyourself that it is no more than your own joy and love and pride in yourown patch of garden written a little large over a few more acres. Again,as always, it was the dignity of the cities that impressed--an austereNorthern dignity of outline, grouping, and perspective, aloof from therush of traffic in the streets. Montreal, of the black-frocked priestsand the French notices, had it; and Ottawa, of the grey stone palacesand the St. Petersburg-like shining water-frontages; and Toronto,consumingly commercial, carried the same power in the same repose. Menare always building better than they know, and perhaps this steadfastarchitecture is waiting for the race when their first flurry ofnewly-realised expansion shall have spent itself, and the presenthurrah's-nest of telephone poles in the streets shall have beenabolished. There are strong objections to any non-fusible, bi-lingualcommunity within a nation, but however much the French are made to hangback in the work of development, their withdrawn and unconcernedcathedrals, schools, and convents, and one aspect of the spirit thatbreathes from them, make for good. Says young Canada: 'There aremillions of dollars' worth of church property in the cities which aren'tallowed to be taxed.' On the other hand, the Catholic schools anduniversities, though they are reported to keep up the old medievalmistrust of Greek, teach the classics as lovingly, tenderly, andintimately as the old Church has always taught them. After all, it mustbe worth something to say your prayers in a dialect of the tongue thatVirgil handled; and a certain touch of insolence, more magnificent andmore ancient than the insolence of present materialism, makes a goodblend in a new land.

I had the good fortune to see the cities through the eyes of anEnglishman out for the first time. 'Have you been to the Bank?' hecried. 'I've never seen anything like it!' 'What's the matter with theBank?' I asked: for the financial situation across the Border was atthat moment more than usual picturesque. 'It's wonderful!' said he;'marble pillars--acres of mosaic--steel grilles--'might be a cathedral.No one ever told me.' 'I shouldn't worry over a Bank that pays itsdepositors,' I replied soothingly. 'There are several like it in Ottawaand Toronto.' Next he ran across some pictures in some palaces, and wasdownright angry because no one had told him that there were fivepriceless private galleries in one city. 'Look here!' he explained.'I've been seeing Corots, and Greuzes, and Gainsboroughs, and aHolbein, and--and hundreds of really splendid pictures!' 'Why shouldn'tyou?' I said. 'They've given up painting their lodges with vermilionhereabouts.' 'Yes, but what I mean is, have you seen the equipment oftheir schools and colleges--desks, libraries, and lavatories? It's milesahead of anything we have and--no one ever told me.' 'What was the goodof telling? You wouldn't have believed. There's a building in one of thecities, on the lines of the Sheldonian, but better, and if you go as faras Winnipeg, you'll see the finest hotel in all the world.'

I left him still lamenting--about a Club and a Gymnasium this time--thatno one had ever told him about; and still doubting all that he had heardof Wonders to come.

If we could only manacle four hundred Members of Parliament, like theChinese in the election cartoons, and walk them round the Empire, whatan all-comprehending little Empire we should be when the survivors gothome!

Certainly the Cities have good right to be proud, and I waited for themto boast; but they were so busy explaining they were only at thebeginning of things that, for the honour of the Family, I had to do theboasting. In this praiseworthy game I credited Melbourne (rightly, Ihope, but the pace was too good to inquire) with acres of municipalbuildings and leagues of art galleries; enlarged the borders of Sydneyharbour to meet a statement about Toronto's, wharfage; and recommendedfolk to see Cape Town Cathedral when it should be finished. But Truthwill out even on a visit. Our Eldest Sister has more of beauty andstrength inside her three cities alone than the rest of Us put together.Yet it would do her no harm to send a commission through the ten greatcities of the Empire to see what is being done there in the way ofstreet cleaning, water-supply, and traffic-regulation.

Here and there the people are infected with the unworthy superstition of'hustle,' which means half-doing your appointed job and applauding yourown slapdasherie for as long a time as would enable you to finish offtwo clean pieces of work. Little congestions of traffic, that an Englishrural policeman, in a country town, disentangles automatically, areallowed to develop into ten-minute blocks, where wagons and men bang,and back, and blaspheme, for no purpose except to waste time.

The assembly and dispersal of crowds, purchase of tickets, and a gooddeal of the small machinery of life is clogged and hampered by thisunstable, southern spirit which is own brother to Panic. 'Hustle' doesnot sit well on the national character any more than falsetto orfidgeting becomes grown men. 'Drive,' a laudable and necessary quality,is quite different, and one meets it up the Western Road where the newcountry is being made.

We got clean away from the Three Cities and the close-tilled farmingand orchard districts, into the Land of Little Lakes--a country ofrushing streams, clear-eyed ponds, and boulders among berry-bushes; allcrying 'Trout' and 'Bear.'

Not so very long ago only a few wise people kept holiday in that part ofthe world, and they did not give away their discoveries. Now it hasbecome a summer playground where people hunt and camp at large. Thenames of its further rivers are known in England, and men, otherwisesane, slip away from London into the birches, and come out again beardedand smoke-stained, when the ice is thick enough to cut a canoe.Sometimes they go to look for game; sometimes for minerals--perhaps,even, oil. No one can prophesy. 'We are only at the beginning ofthings.'

Said an Afrite of the Railway as we passed in our magic carpet: 'You'veno notion of the size of our tourist-traffic. It has all grown up sincethe early 'Nineties. The trolley car teaches people in the towns to gofor little picnics. When they get more money they go for long ones. Allthis Continent will want playgrounds soon. We're getting them ready.'

The girl from Winnipeg saw the morning frost lie white on the long grassat the lake edges, and watched the haze of mellow golden birch leaves asthey dropped. 'Now that's the way trees ought to turn,' she said. 'Don'tyou think our Eastern maple is a little violent in colour?' Then wepassed through a country where for many hours the talk in the cars wasof mines and the treatment of ores. Men told one tales--prospectors'yarns of the sort one used to hear vaguely before Klondike or Nome werepublic property. They did not care whether one believed or doubted.They, too, were only at the beginning of things--silver perhaps, goldperhaps, nickel perhaps. If a great city did not arise at such aplace--the very name was new since my day--it would assuredly be bornwithin a few miles of it. The silent men boarded the cars, and droppedoff, and disappeared beyond thickets and hills precisely as the firstwidely spaced line of skirmishers fans out and vanishes along the frontof the day's battle.

One old man sat before me like avenging Time itself, and talked ofprophecies of evil, that had been falsified. '_They_ said there wasn'tnothing here excep' rocks an' snow. _They_ said there never _wouldn't_be nothing here excep' the railroad. There's them that can't see _yit_,'and he gimleted me with a fierce eye. 'An' all the while, fortunes ismade--piles is made--right under our noses.'

'Have you made your pile?' I asked.

He smiled as the artist smiles--all true prospectors have that loftysmile--'Me? No. I've been a prospector most o' my time, but I haven'tlost anything. I've had my fun out of the game. By God, I've had my funout of it!

I told him how I had once come through when land and timber grantscould have been picked up for half less than nothing.

'Yes,' he said placidly. 'I reckon if you'd had any kind of an educationyou could ha' made a quarter of a million dollars easy in those days.And it's to be made now if you could see where. How? Can you tell mewhat the capital of the Hudson Bay district's goin' to be? You can't.Nor I. Nor yet where the six next new cities is going to arise, I getoff here, but if I have my health I'll be out next summeragain--prospectin' North.'

Imagine a country where men prospect till they are seventy, with no fearof fever, fly, horse-sickness, or trouble from the natives--a countrywhere food and water always taste good! He told me curious things aboutsome fabled gold--the Eternal Mother-lode--out in the North, which isto humble the pride of Nome. And yet, so vast is the Empire, he hadnever heard the name of Johannesburg!

As the train swung round the shores of Lake Superior the talk swung overto Wheat. Oh yes, men said, there were mines in the country--they wereonly at the beginning of mines--but that part of the world existed toclean and grade and handle and deliver the Wheat by rail and steamer.The track was being duplicated by a few hundred miles to keep abreast ofthe floods of it. By and by it might be a four-track road. They wereonly at the beginning. Meantime here was the Wheat sprouting, tendergreen, a foot high, among a hundred sidings where it had spilled fromthe cars; there were the high-shouldered, tea-caddy grain-elevators toclean, and the hospitals to doctor the Wheat; here was new, gailypainted machinery going forward to reap and bind and thresh the Wheat,and all those car-loads of workmen had been slapping down more sidingsagainst the year's delivery of the Wheat.

Two towns stand on the shores of the lake less than a mile apart. WhatLloyd's is to shipping, or the College of Surgeons to medicine, thatthey are to the Wheat. Its honour and integrity are in their hands; andthey hate each other with the pure, poisonous, passionate hatred whichmakes towns grow. If Providence wiped out one of them, the survivorwould pine away and die--a mateless hate-bird. Some day they must unite,and the question of the composite name they shall then carry alreadyvexes them. A man there told me that Lake Superior was 'a useful pieceof water,' in that it lay so handy to the C.P.R. tracks. There is aquiet horror about the Great Lakes which grows as one revisits them.Fresh water has no right or call to dip over the horizon, pulling downand pushing up the hulls of big steamers; no right to tread the slow,deep-sea dance-step between wrinkled cliffs; nor to roar in on weed andsand beaches between vast headlands that run out for leagues into hazeand sea-fog. Lake Superior is all the same stuff as what towns pay taxesfor, but it engulfs and wrecks and drives ashore, like a fullyaccredited ocean--a hideous thing to find in the heart of a continent.Some people go sailing on it for pleasure, and it has produced a breedof sailors who bear the same relation to the salt-water variety as asnake-charmer does to a lion-tamer.

Yet it is undoubtedly a useful piece of water.

NEWSPAPERS AND DEMOCRACY

Let it be granted that, as the loud-voiced herald hired by the Eolithictribe to cry the news of the coming day along the caves, preceded thechosen Tribal Bard who sang the more picturesque history of the tribe,so is Journalism senior to Literature, in that Journalism meets thefirst tribal need after warmth, food, and women.

In new countries it shows clear trace of its descent from the TribalHerald. A tribe thinly occupying large spaces feels lonely. It desiresto hear the roll-call of its members cried often and loudly; to comfortitself with the knowledge that there are companions just below thehorizon. It employs, therefore, heralds to name and describe all whopass. That is why newspapers of new countries seem often so outrageouslypersonal. The tribe, moreover, needs quick and sure knowledge ofeverything that touches on its daily life in the big spaces--earth, air,and water news which the Older Peoples have put behind them. That is whyits newspapers so often seem so laboriously trivial.

For example, a red-nosed member of the tribe, Pete O'Halloran, comes inthirty miles to have his horse shod, and incidentally smashes theking-bolt of his buckboard at a bad place in the road. The TribalHerald--a thin weekly, with a patent inside--connects the red nose andthe breakdown with an innuendo which, to the outsider, is clumsy libel.But the Tribal Herald understands that two-and-seventy families of thetribe may use that road weekly. It concerns them to discover whether theaccident was due to Pete being drunk or, as Pete protests, to theneglected state of the road. Fifteen men happen to know that Pete's noseis an affliction, not an indication. One of them loafs across andexplains to the Tribal Herald, who, next week, cries aloud that the roadought to be mended. Meantime Pete, warmed to the marrow at havingfocussed the attention of his tribe for a few moments, retires thirtymiles up-stage, pursued by advertisements of buckboards guaranteed notto break their king-bolts, and later (which is what the tribe were afterall the time) some tribal authority or other mends the road.

This is only a big-scale diagram, but with a little attention you cansee the tribal instinct of self-preservation quite logicallyunderrunning all sorts of queer modern developments.

As the tribe grows, and men do not behold the horizon from edge tounbroken edge, their desire to know all about the next man weakens alittle--but not much. Outside the cities are still the long distances,the 'vast, unoccupied areas' of the advertisements; and the men who comeand go yearn to keep touch with and report themselves as of old totheir lodges. A man stepping out of the dark into the circle of thefires naturally, if he be a true man, holds up his hands and says, 'I,So-and-So, am here.' You can watch the ritual in full swing at any hotelwhen the reporter (_pro_ Tribal Herald) runs his eyes down the list ofarrivals, and before he can turn from the register is met by thenewcomer, who, without special desire for notoriety, explains hisbusiness and intentions. Observe, it is always at evening that thereporter concerns himself with strangers. By day he follows theactivities of his own city and the doings of nearby chiefs; but when itis time to close the stockade, to laager the wagons, to draw thethorn-bush back into the gap, then in all lands he reverts to the TribalHerald, who is also the tribal Outer Guard.

There are countries where a man is indecently pawed over by chatteringheralds who bob their foul torches in his face till he is singed andsmoked at once. In Canada the necessary 'Stand and deliver yoursentiments' goes through with the large decency that stamps all theDominion. A stranger's words are passed on to the tribe quiteaccurately; no dirt is put into his mouth, and where the heralds judgethat it would be better not to translate certain remarks theycourteously explain why.

It was always delightful to meet the reporters, for they were meninterested in their land, with the keen, unselfish interest that onefinds in young house-surgeons or civilians. Thanks to the (Boer) war,many of them had reached out to the ends of our earth, and spoke of thesister nations as it did one good to hear. Consequently theinterviews--which are as dreary for the reporter as the reported--oftenturned into pleasant and unpublished talks. One felt at every turn ofthe quick sentences to be dealing with made and trained players of thegame--balanced men who believed in decencies not to be disregarded,confidences not to be violated, and honour not to be mocked. (This mayexplain what men and women have told me--that there is very little ofthe brutal domestic terrorism of the Press in Canada, and not muchblackmailing.) They neither spat nor wriggled; they interpolated nojuicy anecdotes of murder or theft among their acquaintance; and notonce between either ocean did they or any other fellow-subjectsvolunteer that their country was 'law-abiding.'

You know the First Sign-post on the Great Main Road? 'When a Womanadvertises that she is virtuous, a Man that he is a gentleman, aCommunity that it is loyal, or a Country that it is law-abiding--go theother way!'

Yet, while the men's talk was so good and new, their written word seemedto be cast in conventional, not to say old-fashioned, moulds. A quarterof a century ago a sub-editor, opening his mail, could identify theMelbourne _Argus_, the Sydney _Morning Herald_, or the Cape _Times_ asfar as he could see them. Even unheaded clippings from them declaredtheir origin as a piece of hide betrays the beast that wore it. But henoticed then that Canadian journals left neither spoor nor scent--mighthave blown in from anywhere between thirty degrees of latitude--and hadto be carefully identified by hand. To-day, the spacing, the headlines,the advertising of Canadian papers, the chessboard-like look of the openpage which should be a daily beautiful study in black and white, thebrittle pulp-paper, the machine-set type, are all as standardised as therailway cars of the Continent. Indeed, looking through a mass ofCanadian journals is like trying to find one's own sleeper in a corridortrain. Newspaper offices are among the most conservative organisationsin the world; but surely after twenty-five years some changes might bepermitted to creep in; some original convention of expression orassembly might be developed.

I drew up to this idea cautiously among a knot of fellow-craftsmen. 'Youmean,' said one straight-eyed youth, 'that we are a back-number copyingback-numbers?'

It was precisely what I did mean, so I made haste to deny it. 'We knowthat,' he said cheerfully. 'Remember we haven't the sea all roundus--and the postal rates to England have only just been lowered. It willall come right.'

Surely it will; but meantime one hates to think of these splendid peopleusing second-class words to express first-class emotions.

And so naturally from Journalism to Democracy. Every country is entitledto her reservations, and pretences, but the more 'democratic' a landis, the more make-believes must the stranger respect. Some of the TribalHeralds were very good to me in this matter, and, as it were, nudged mewhen it was time to duck in the House of Rimmon. During their officehours they professed an unflinching belief in the blessed word'Democracy,' which means any crowd on the move--that is to say, thehelpless thing which breaks through floors and falls into cellars;overturns pleasure-boats by rushing from port to starboard; stamps meninto pulp because it thinks it has lost sixpence, and jams and grills inthe doorways of blazing theatres. Out of office, like every one else,they relaxed. Many winked, a few were flippant, but they all agreed thatthe only drawback to Democracy was Demos--a jealous God of primitivetastes and despotic tendencies. I received a faithful portrait of himfrom a politician who had worshipped him all his life. It waspractically the Epistle of Jeremy--the sixth chapter of Baruch--doneinto unquotable English.

But Canada is not yet an ideal Democracy. For one thing she has had towork hard among rough-edged surroundings which carry inevitableconsequences. For another, the law in Canada exists and is administered,not as a surprise, a joke, a favour, a bribe, or a Wrestling Turkexhibition, but as an integral part of the national character--no moreto be forgotten or talked about than one's trousers. If you kill, youhang. If you steal, you go to jail. This has worked toward peace,self-respect, and, I think, the innate dignity of the people. On theother hand--which is where the trouble will begin--railways and steamersmake it possible nowadays to bring in persons who need never lose touchof hot and cold water-taps, spread tables, and crockery till they areturned out, much surprised, into the wilderness. They clean miss thelong weeks of salt-water and the slow passage across the plains whichpickled and tanned the early emigrants. They arrive with soft bodies andunaired souls. I had this vividly brought home to me by a man on a trainamong the Selkirks. He stood on the safely railed rear-platform, lookedat the gigantic pine-furred shoulder round which men at their lives'risk had led every yard of the track, and chirruped: 'I say, why can'tall this be nationalised?' There was nothing under heaven except thesnows and the steep to prevent him from dropping off the cars andhunting a mine for himself. Instead of which he went into thedining-car. That is one type.

A man told me the old tale of a crowd of Russian immigrants who at a bigfire in a city 'verted to the ancestral type, and blocked the streetsyelling, 'Down with the Czar!' That is another type. A few days later Iwas shown a wire stating that a community of Doukhobors--Russiansagain--had, not for the first time, undressed themselves, and werefleeing up the track to meet the Messiah before the snow fell. Policewere pursuing them with warm underclothing, and trains would pleasetake care not to run over them.

So there you have three sort of steam-borne unfitness--soft, savage, andmad. There is a fourth brand, which may be either home-grown orimported, but democracies do not recognise it, of downright badfolk--grown, healthy men and women who honestly rejoice in doing evil.These four classes acting together might conceivably produce a ratherpernicious democracy; alien hysteria, blood-craze, and the like,reinforcing local ignorance, sloth, and arrogance. For example, I read aletter in a paper sympathising with these same Doukhobors. The writerknew a community of excellent people in England (you see where the rotstarts!) who lived barefoot, paid no taxes, ate nuts, and were abovemarriage. They were a soulful folk, living pure lives. The Doukhoborswere also pure and soulful, entitled in a free country to live their ownlives, and not to be oppressed, etc. etc. (Imported soft, observe,playing up to Imported mad.) Meantime, disgusted police were chasing theDoukhobors into flannels that they might live to produce children fit toconsort with the sons of the man who wrote that letter and the daughtersof the crowd that lost their heads at the fire.

'All of which,' men and women answered, 'we admit. But what can we do?We want people.' And they showed vast and well-equipped schools, wherethe children of Slav immigrants are taught English and the songs ofCanada. 'When they grow up,' people said, 'you can't tell them fromCanadians.' It was a wonderful work. The teacher holds up pens, reels,and so forth, giving the name in English; the children repeating Chinesefashion. Presently when they have enough words they can bridge back tothe knowledge they learned in their own country, so that a boy oftwelve, at, say, the end of a year, will produce a well-written Englishaccount of his journey from Russia, how much his mother paid for food bythe way, and where his father got his first job. He will also lay hishand on his heart, and say, 'I--am--a--Canadian.' This gratifies theCanadian, who naturally purrs over an emigrant owing everything to theland which adopted him and set him on his feet. The Lady Bountiful of anEnglish village takes the same interest in a child she has helped on inthe world. And the child repays by his gratitude and good behaviour?

Personally, one cannot care much for those who have renounced their owncountry. They may have had good reason, but they have broken the rulesof the game, and ought to be penalised instead of adding to their score.Nor is it true, as men pretend, that a few full meals and fine clothesobliterate all taint of alien instinct and reversion. A thousand yearscannot be as yesterday for mankind; and one has only to glance at theraces across the Border to realise how in outlook, manner, expression,and morale the South and South-east profoundly and fatally affects theNorth and North-west. That was why the sight of the beady-eyed,muddy-skinned, aproned women, with handkerchiefs on their heads andOriental bundles in their hands, always distressed one.

'But _why_ must you get this stuff?' I asked. 'You know it is not yourequal, and it knows that it is not your equal; and that is bad for youboth. What is the matter with the English as immigrants?'

The answers were explicit: 'Because the English do not work. Because weare sick of Remittance-men and loafers sent out here. Because theEnglish are rotten with Socialism. Because the English don't fit withour life. They kick at our way of doing things. They are always tellingus how things are done in England. They carry frills! Don't you know thestory of the Englishman who lost his way and was found half-dead ofthirst beside a river? When he was asked why he didn't drink, he said,"How the deuce can I without a glass?"'

'But,' I argued over three thousand miles of country, 'all these areexcellent reasons for bringing in the Englishman. It is true that in hisown country he is taught to shirk work, because kind, silly people fallover each other to help and debauch and amuse him. Here, General Januarywill stiffen him up. Remittance-men are an affliction to every branch ofthe Family, but your manners and morals can't be so tender as to sufferfrom a few thousand of them among your six millions. As to theEnglishman's Socialism, he is, by nature, the most unsocial animalalive. What you call Socialism is his intellectual equivalent forDiabolo and Limerick competitions. As to his criticisms, you surelywouldn't marry a woman who agreed with you in everything, and you oughtto choose your immigrants on the same lines. You admit that the Canadianis too busy to kick at anything. The Englishman is a born kicker. ("Yes,he is all that," they said.) He kicks on principle, and that is whatmakes for civilisation. So did your Englishman's instinct about theglass. Every new country needs--vitally needs--one-half of one per centof its population trained to die of thirst rather than drink out oftheir hands. You are always talking of the second generation of yourSmyrniotes and Bessarabians. Think what the second generation of theEnglish are!'

They thought--quite visibly--but they did not much seem to relish it.There was a queer stringhalt in their talk--a conversational shy acrossthe road--when one touched on these subjects. After a while I went to aTribal Herald whom I could trust, and demanded of him point-blank wherethe trouble really lay, and who was behind it.

'It is Labour,' he said. 'You had better leave it alone.'

LABOUR

One cannot leave a thing alone if it is thrust under the nose at everyturn. I had not quitted the Quebec steamer three minutes when I wasasked point-blank: 'What do you think of the question of AsiaticExclusion which is Agitating our Community?'

The Second Sign-Post on the Great Main Road says: 'If a Community isagitated by a Question--inquire politely after the health of theAgitator,' This I did, without success; and had to temporise all acrossthe Continent till I could find some one to help me to acceptableanswers. The Question appears to be confined to British Columbia. There,after a while, the men who had their own reasons for not wishing to talkreferred me to others who explained, and on the acutest understandingthat no names were to be published (it is sweet to see engineers afraidof being hoist by their own petards) one got more or less at somethinglike facts.

The Chinaman has always been in the habit of coming to British Columbia,where he makes, as he does elsewhere, the finest servant in the world.No one, I was assured on all hands, objects to the biddable Chinaman.He takes work which no white man in a new country will handle, and whenkicked by the mean white will not grossly retaliate. He has always paidfor the privilege of making his fortune on this wonderful coast, butwith singular forethought and statesmanship, the popular Will, some fewyears ago, decided to double the head-tax on his entry. Strange as itmay appear, the Chinaman now charges double for his services, and isscarce at that. This is said to be one of the reasons why overworkedwhite women die or go off their heads; and why in new cities you can seeblocks of flats being built to minimise the inconveniences ofhousekeeping without help. The birth-rate will fall later in exactproportion to those flats.

Since the Russo-Japanese War the Japanese have taken to coming over toBritish Columbia. They also do work which no white man will; such ashauling wet logs for lumber mills out of cold water at from eight to tenshillings a day. They supply the service in hotels and dining-rooms andkeep small shops. The trouble with them is that they are just a littletoo good, and when attacked defend themselves with asperity.

A fair sprinkling of Punjabis--ex-soldiers, Sikhs, Muzbis, and Jats--arecoming in on the boats. The plague at home seems to have made themrestless, but I could not gather why so many of them come from Shahpur,Phillour, and Jullundur way. These men do not, of course, offer forhouse-service, but work in the lumber mills, and with the least littlecare and attention could be made most valuable. Some one ought to tellthem not to bring their old men with them, and better arrangementsshould be made for their remitting money home to their villages. Theyare not understood, of course; but they are not hated.

The objection is all against the Japanese. So far--except that they aresaid to have captured the local fishing trade at Vancouver, precisely asthe Malays control the Cape Town fish business--they have not yetcompeted with the whites; but I was earnestly assured by many men thatthere was danger of their lowering the standard of life and wages. Thedemand, therefore, in certain quarters is that they go--absolutely andunconditionally. (You may have noticed that Democracies are strong onthe imperative mood.) An attempt was made to shift them shortly before Icame to Vancouver, but it was not very successful, because the Japanesebarricaded their quarters and flocked out, a broken bottle held by theneck in either hand, which they jabbed in the faces of thedemonstrators. It is, perhaps, easier to haze and hammer bewilderedHindus and Tamils, as is being done across the Border, than to stampedethe men of the Yalu and Liaoyang.[5]

[Footnote 5: Battles in the Russo-Japanese War.]

But when one began to ask questions one got lost in a maze of hints,reservations, and orations, mostly delivered with constraint, as thoughthe talkers were saying a piece learned by heart. Here are somesamples:--

A man penned me in a corner with a single heavily capitalised sentence.'There is a General Sentiment among Our People that the Japanese MustGo,' said he.

'Very good,' said I. 'How d'you propose to set about it?'

'That is nothing to us. There is a General Sentiment,' etc.

'Quite so. Sentiment is a beautiful thing, but what are you going todo?' He did not condescend to particulars, but kept repeating thesentiment, which, as I promised, I record.

Another man was a little more explicit. 'We desire,' he said, 'to keepthe Chinaman. But the Japanese must go.'

'Then who takes their place? Isn't this rather a new country to pitchpeople out of?'

'We must develop our Resources slowly, sir--with an Eye to the Interestsof our Children. We must preserve the Continent for Races which willassimilate with Ours. We must not be swamped by Aliens.'

'Then bring in your own races and bring 'em in quick,' I ventured.

This is the one remark one must not make in certain quarters of theWest; and I lost caste heavily while he explained (exactly as the Dutchdid at the Cape years ago) how British Columbia was by no means so richas she appeared; that she was throttled by capitalists and monopolistsof all kinds; that white labour had to be laid off and fed and warmedduring the winter; that living expenses were enormously high; that theywere at the end of a period of prosperity, and were now entering onlean years; and that whatever steps were necessary for bringing in morewhite people should be taken with extreme caution. Then he added thatthe railway rates to British Columbia were so high that emigrants weredebarred from coming on there.

'But haven't the rates been reduced?' I asked.

'Yes--yes, I believe they have, but immigrants are so much in demandthat they are snapped up before they have got so far West. You mustremember, too, that skilled labour is not like agricultural labour. Itis dependent on so many considerations. And the Japanese must go.'

'So people have told me. But I heard stories of dairies and fruit-farmsin British Columbia being thrown up because there was no labour to milkor pick the fruit. Is that true, d'you think?'

'Well, you can't expect a man with all the chances that our countryoffers him to milk cows in a pasture. A Chinaman can do that. We wantraces that will assimilate with ours,' etc., etc.

'But didn't the Salvation Army offer to bring in three or four thousandEnglish some short time ago? What came of that idea?'

'It--er--fell through.'

'Why?'

'For political reasons, I believe. We do not want People who will lowerthe Standard of Living. That is why the Japanese must go.'

'Then why keep the Chinese?'

'We can get on with the Chinese. We can't get on without the Chinese.But we must have Emigration of a Type that will assimilate with OurPeople. I hope I have made myself clear?'

I hoped that he had, too.

Now hear a wife, a mother, and a housekeeper.

'We have to pay for this precious state of things with our health andour children's. Do you know the saying that the Frontier is hard onwomen and cattle? This isn't the frontier, but in some respects it'sworse, because we have all the luxuries and appearances--the prettyglass and silver to put on the table. We have to dust, polish, andarrange 'em after we've done our housework. I don't suppose that meansanything to you, but--try it for a month! We have no help. A Chinamancosts fifty or sixty dollars a month now. Our husbands can't alwaysafford that. How old would you take me for? I'm not thirty. Well thankGod, I stopped my sister coming out West. Oh yes, it's a finecountry--for men.'

'Can't you import servants from England?'

'I can't pay a girl's passage in order to have her married in threemonths. Besides, she wouldn't work. They won't when they see Chinamenworking.'

'Do you object to the Japanese, too?'

'Of course not. No one does. It's only politics. The wives of the menwho earn six and seven dollars a day--skilled labour they call it--haveChinese and Jap servants. _We_ can't afford it. _We_ have to think ofsaving for the future, but those other people live up to every cent theyearn. They know _they're_ all right. They're Labour. They'll be lookedafter, whatever happens. You can see how the State looks after me.'

A little later I had occasion to go through a great and beautiful citybetween six and seven of a crisp morning. Milk and fish, vegetables,etc., were being delivered to the silent houses by Chinese and Japanese.Not a single white man was visible on that chilly job.

Later still a man came to see me, without too publicly giving his name.He was in a small way of business, and told me (others had said much thesame thing) that if I gave him away his business would suffer. He talkedfor half an hour on end.

'Am I to understand, then,' I said, 'that what you call Labourabsolutely dominates this part of the world?'

He nodded.

'That it is difficult to get skilled labour into here?'

'Difficult? My God, if I want to get an extra hand for my business--Ipay Union wages, of course--I have to arrange to get him here secretly.I have to go out and meet him, accidental-like, down the line, and ifthe Unions find out that he is coming, they, like as not, order him backEast, or turn him down across the Border.'

'Even if he has his Union ticket? Why?'

'They'll tell him that labour conditions are not good here. He knowswhat that means. He'll turn back quick enough. I'm in a small way ofbusiness, and I can't afford to take any chances fighting the Unions.'

'What would happen if you did?'

'D'you know what's happening across the Border? Men get blown upthere--with dynamite.'

'But this isn't across the Border?'

'It's a damn-sight too near to be pleasant. And witnesses get blown up,too. You see, the Labour situation ain't run from our side the line.It's worked from down under. You may have noticed men were rathercareful when they talked about it?'

'Yes, I noticed all that.'

'Well, it ain't a pleasant state of affairs. I don't say that the Unionshere would do anything _to_ you--and please understand I'm all for therights of Labour myself. Labour has no better friend than me--I've beena working man, though I've got a business of my own now. Don't run awaywith any idea that I'm against Labour--will you?'

'Not in the least. I can see that. You merely find that Labour's alittle bit--er--inconsiderate, sometimes?'

'Look what happens across the Border! I suppose they've told you thatlittle fuss with the Japanese in Vancouver was worked from down under,haven't they? I don't think our own people 'ud have done it bythemselves.'

'I've heard that several times. Is it quite sporting, do you think, tolay the blame on another country?'

'_You_ don't live here. But as I was saying--if we get rid of the Japsto-day, we'll be told to get rid of some one else to-morrow. There's nolimit, sir, to what Labour wants. None!'

'I thought they only want a fair day's wage for a fair day's work?'

'That may do in the Old Country, but here they mean to boss the country.They do.'

'And how does the country like it?'

'We're about sick of it. It don't matter much in flushtimes--employers'll do most anything sooner than stop work--but when wecome to a pinch, you'll hear something. We're a rich land--in spite ofeverything they make out--but we're held up at every turn by Labour.Why, there's businesses on businesses which friends of mine--in a smallway like myself--want to start. Businesses in every direction--if theywas only allowed to start in. But they ain't.'

'That's a pity. Now, what do you think about the Japanese question?'

'I don't think. I know. Both political parties are playing up to theLabour vote--if you understand what that means.'

I tried to understand.

'And neither side'll tell the truth--that if the Asiatic goes, this sideof the Continent'll drop out of sight, unless we get free whiteimmigration. And any party that proposed white immigration on a largescale 'ud be snowed under next election. I'm telling you what